Ulysses (1922)

[Corpsey]

Cheers! Guess I'll download the complete works of De Quincey... For £1.99.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Just done the Bloom's trial section of Circe. Reminds me of Burroughs quite a lot - similar dark, surreal humour, phantasmagoria, text put through the blender and reconfigured.

 

[version]

Just done the Bloom's trial section of Circe. Reminds me of Burroughs quite a lot - similar dark, surreal humour, phantasmagoria, text put through the blender and reconfigured.

VIRAG (Agueshaken, profuse yellow spawn foaming over his bony epileptic lips.) She sold lovephiltres, whitewax, orange flower. Panther, the Roman centurion, polluted her with his genitories. (He sticks out a flickering phosphorescent scorpion tongue, his hand on his fork.) Messiah! He burst her tympanum. (With gibbering baboon's cries he jerks his hips in the cynical spasm.) Hik! Hek! Hak! Hok! Huk! Kok! Kuk!

 

[Benny Bunter]

There you go.

Been a long time since I've read Burroughs but that's very Naked Lunch isn't it?

 

[Benny Bunter]

And Nighttown is a sort of interzone

 

[Benny Bunter]

This bit is also very Naked Lunch. 😬

(He jerks the rope. The assistants leap at the victim's legs and drag him downward, grunting: the croppy boy's tongue protrudes violently.)


THE CROPPY BOY

Horhot ho hray hor hother's hest.

(He gives up the ghost. A violent erection of the hanged sends gouts of sperm spouting through his deathclothes on to the cobblestones. Mrs Bellingham, Mrs Yelverton Barry and the Honourable Mrs Mervyn Talboys rush forward with their handkerchiefs to sop it up.)

Looking forward to getting this episode out of the way by this point.

 

[Corpsey]

Oh yeah I remember thinking of Burroughs when I read that. Don't they discuss the erection when hung thing in the Cyclops episode? Or it appears in the parodies or something.

Circe is among other things a big recapitulation of everything that led up to it. I think one book I read about it saw Circe as a necessary purging of the subconscious before the climactic three episodes.

 

[Corpsey]

And yes Circe is interminable. Full of brilliance but goes on and on and on.

Luckily, the final three episodes are great, even the cabman's shelter which I'd dreaded reading, under the impersonation it was written entirely in cliches, a sort of parody of dud journalism. Which it somewhat is, but it's also the scene where Bloom and Stephen finally meet.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Oh yeah I remember thinking of Burroughs when I read that. Don't they discuss the erection when hung thing in the Cyclops episode? Or it appears in the parodies or something.

Circe is among other things a big recapitulation of everything that led up to it. I think one book I read about it saw Circe as a necessary purging of the subconscious before the climactic three episodes.

Yeah the hanging/erection got discussed in some earlier episode, can't remember which.

I've read through this episode pretty quickly without consulting notes cos I thought I'd get stuck on it otherwise. Loads of really good/funny bits (Bloom's trial/coronation parodies especially), got lost on some sections but just ploughed through it really. A purging of the subconscious is definitely a good way to describe it.

 

[version]

There's a bit of Gravity's Rainbow about 'Circe' too. Reminded me of Slothrop's trip down the toilet during his sodium amytal experience.

 

[Corpsey]

I like the section where Bloom is transformed into a woman by the brothel mistress and bullied by her, shamed by various phantoms for being a pervert etc and then (thanks to the magical button burst) rounds on them all with a sort of heroic, pragmatic wit and finally relents and returns to us as the gentle bloom we all know and love.

Bloom half rises. His back trouserbutton snaps.)

450
THE BUTTON

Bip!

(Two sluts of the Coombe dance rainily by, shawled, yelling flatly.)

552
THE SLUTS



O, Leopold lost the pin of his drawers
He didn't know what to do,
To keep it up,
To keep it up.

BLOOM

(Coldly.) You have broken the spell. The last straw. If there were only ethereal where would you all be, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing.

THE YEWS

(Their silverfoil of leaves precipitating, their skinny arms aging and swaying.) Deciduously!

THE NYMPH

Sacrilege! To attempt my virtue! (A large moist stain appears on her robe.) Sully my innocence! You are not fit to touch the garment of a pure woman. (She clutches again in her robe.) Wait. Satan, you'll sing no more lovesongs. Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. (She draws a poniard and, clad in the sheathmail of an elected knight of nine, strikes at his loins.) Nekum!

BLOOM

(Starts up, seizes her hand.) Hoy! Nebrakada! Cat o' nine lives! Fair play, madam. No pruningknife. The fox and the grapes, is it? What 480do we lack with your barbed wire? Crucifix not thick enough? (He clutches her veil.) A holy abbot you want or Brophy, the lame gardener, or the spoutless statue of the watercarrier, or good mother Alphonsus, eh Reynard?

516
THE NYMPH

(With a cry flees from him unveiled, her plaster cast cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks.) Poli...!

BLOOM

(Calls after her.) As if you didn't get it on the double yourselves. No jerks and multiple mucosities all over you. I tried 553it. Your strength our weakness. What's our studfee? 390What will you pay on the nail? You fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (The fleeing nymph raises a keen.) Eh? I have sixteen 451years of black slave labour behind me. And would a jury give me five shillings alimony tomorrow, eh? Fool someone else, not me. (He sniffs.) Rut. Onions. Stale. Sulphur. Grease.

(The figure of Bella Cohen stands before him.)

BELLA

You'll know me the next time.

BLOOM

(Composed, regards her.) Passée. Mutton dressed as lamb. Long in the tooth and superfluous hair. A raw onion the last thing at night would benefit your complexion. And take some double chin drill. Your eyes are as vapid as the glasseyes of your stuffed fox. They have the dimensions of your other features, that's all. I'm not a triple screw propeller.

BELLA

(Contemptuously.) You're not game, in fact. (Her sowcunt barks.) Fohracht!

BLOOM

(Contemptuously.) Clean your nailless middle finger first, your bully's cold spunk is dripping from your cockscomb. Take a handful of hay and wipe yourself.

BELLA

I know you, canvasser! Dead cod!

BLOOM

I saw him, kipkeeper! Pox and gleet vendor!

554517
BELLA

(Turns to the piano.) Which of you was playing the dead march from Saul?

481
ZOE

Me. Mind your cornflowers. (She darts to the piano and bangs chords on it with crossed arms.) The cat's ramble through the slag. (She glances back.) Eh? Who's making love to my sweeties? (She darts back to the table.) What's yours is mine and what's mine is my own.

(Kitty, disconcerted, coats her teeth with the silver paper. Bloom approaches Zoe.)

452
BLOOM

(Gently.) Give me back that potato, will you?

ZOE

Forfeits, a fine thing and a superfine thing.

BLOOM

(With feeling.) It is nothing, but still, a relic of poor mamma

 

[version]

Did you like this bit too?

THE VEILED LUKA
(Enthusiastically.) I'm a Cranerite and I glory in it. I believe in him in spite of all. I'd give my life for him, the funniest man on earth.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Found a copy of the 2nd volume of the Norton Anthology of English Literature today (2500 pages, 10 euros -score!) sat down in a bar to flick through it and what was the first poem it fell open on? Swinburne''s Great Sweet Mother.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Can't say I enjoyed Eumaeus very much. Impressive to keep up such a perfect parody of bad writing for so many pages, (it's as if he'd read Orwell's Politics and the English Language essay and set out to break every rule in it) but who wants to actually read it?

The other parodies in Cyclops and Oxen of the Sun are funnier and work better cos they only last a couple of paragraphs each time before moving on to the next one, but this one just keeps going and the joke quickly wears off.

 

[Corpsey]

I was surprised to find myself enjoying that one. I think after the madness of Oxen and Circe it was a relief to read plain (albeit torturedly clichéd) prose. I've read various theories on the style, including (perhaps Joyce himself said this, can't remember) that it's written in that way to communicate the exhaustion they're feeling after all those events, and it being very late at night by then. One book I read even suggests that it's written as if to mimic Bloom's hesitant, polite, exhaustive voice.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Yeah, you can't knock it as a technical achievement, it was just a lot less pleasurable to read than all the other episodes for me. Next one looks good though.

 

[version]

One book I read even suggests that it's written as if to mimic Bloom's hesitant, polite, exhaustive voice.

Kenner says this. That it's Joyce rewarding Bloom with his own stab at an episode.

 

[Corpsey]

I was reading a bit of it earlier and it does seem to be written in a sort of cagey, fastidious, nervously pedantic way which (this might be a yogic stretch) chimes with Bloom's eagerness to impress Stephen.

 

[luka]

boring book for losers

 

[Benny Bunter]

Feels good. Satisfying. And it isn't overrated. And it ends brilliantly.

Molly's monologue was one of the only episodes I read without annotations, I put the audiobook on which helped a lot, propelled me through it in about two and a half hours. Was a magical experience.

It's also probably the best episode in the whole book and one of the best things I've ever read. It wouldn't make sense without what comes before it, which is part of its brilliance because it ties everything together in certain ways. I love how her memories of Gibraltar merge with memories of Howth to evoke Ithaca and the Odyssey at the close. It reminded me most of all of "The Dead". Her memories of a dead lover, the sense of tenderness and transcendence at the end.

Fully agree with all this, nothing more to add. You really couldn't ask for a better ending than that.